Strategic Healthcare Leadership

Overview and Courses

A smartly designed, well-executed strategic plan is indispensable not only to an organization’s long-term success, but to its very survival. Today’s healthcare leaders need to lead their organizations and be able to strategically drive initiatives that interact with multiple affiliated entities. Whether you are a senior leader looking to refine your strategic skills or an early to mid-level healthcare professional aspiring to a strategic position, leading strategic initiatives will be key your growth and success as a leader.

The Strategic Healthcare Leadership Certificate provides you with the critical skills you need to lead strategic initiatives in your organization to success through a series of six courses. Ultimately, leaders will increase their effectiveness in leading healthcare organizations through improved knowledge, skills, and practice implementing strategic plans.

What You’ll Earn

Strategic Healthcare Leadership Certificate from Cornell College of Human Ecology and Cornell SC Johnson College of Business

Healthcare organizations and the physicians who run them often approach the task of management in much the same way as they approach a patient: they quickly identify symptoms or problems, make a diagnosis or analysis, and develop a treatment plan or solution. While this technique may work when making decisions about day-to-day operations, it’s inadequate for evaluating the overall health of an organization and for making long-term survival plans. Effective strategic planning requires healthcare managers to shift their perspective from being a service organization to being a business.

This course teaches you several models to help you lay the foundations of a strategic plan based on the existing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing your organization. Ultimately, you will learn how to collect the right data to help you evaluate whether to invest in, discontinue, or develop certain products and services to ensure any strategic plan you devize will be profitable and in alignment with your organization’s mission and vision.

Many medical groups develop strategic plans that are never implemented because the plans did not articulate how to measure progress, did not assign resources to do the work, and did not consider how to report on the goals.

This course asks you to apply organizational information you’ve gathered using analysis tools such as SWOT, BCG, and Porter's Five Forces to develop a strategic plan that includes specific details about who, what, when, where, and how to work on each of the agreed-upon strategic goals.

Ultimately, this course will equip you with the tools to be able to develop a comprehensive strategic plan that involves the right stakeholders and that aligns with your organization’s core mission and values.

Performance reporting has three main aspects that managers must understand in order to implement it properly:

1. Managers must represent organizational strategy the way a scientist would, by identifying causes and effects and linking each cause and effect to a measure can be reported, discussed and improved upon throughout the organization.

2. Managers must understand the inherent errors in your measures of performance. You need to understand the nature of the errors and how best to address them.

3. Managers must understand how the performance measures you create will influence the behavior of others.

This online course explores the types and sources of measurement error, the use of causal models in analyzing measures of performance, and the differences between managing measures and managing performance.

The ability to make effective and timely decisions is an essential skill for successful executives. Mastery of this skill influences all aspects of day-to-day operations as well as strategic planning. In this course, developed by Professor Robert Bloomfield, Ph.D. of Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, you will hone your decision-making skills by following a methodology based on tested actions and sound organizational approaches. You will leave this course better equipped to confidently tackle any decision large or small, and you’ll do so in a way that creates the optimal conditions for success.

All leadership is change leadership. Good leadership isn’t about stagnation; it’s about moving ahead. In this course, Cornell University's Professor Samuel Bacharach, Ph.D., explores the fundamental, practical skills that effective leaders have mastered.

Effective change leaders do three things; they anticipate where things are moving, they facilitate the implementation of change, and they sustain momentum by taking charge and moving things ahead. Great change leaders know how to be both proactive and reactive, as Professor Bacharach explains. Students in this course will examine their own leadership styles and practice skills that will help them translate ideas into organizational results, find ways to overcome organizational inertia, and examine strategies for overcoming individual resistance to change.

Leaders at every level need to be able to execute on their ideas. In virtually every case, this means that leaders need to be able to persuade others to join in this execution. In order to do so, understanding how to create and utilize power in an organization is critical.

In this course, developed by Professor Glen Dowell, Ph.D., of Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, students will focus on their personal relationship with power as well as how power works in their organization and social network.

Project Management Institute (PMI®) Continuing Certification: Participants who successfully complete this course will receive 6 Professional Development Units (PDUs) from PMI®. Please contact PMI® for details about professional project management certification or recertification.